Forum: The dam before the flood - A Hungarian who opened the floodgates on reform

HUNGARIANS, the pathfinders in the political revolution in Eastern Europe,
are celebrating an ecological as well as a political triumph. One man, Janos
Vargha, was at the heart of them both.

Vargha, a biologist, has a fierce and brave regard for the truth. In
1980, he wrote an article for a Hungarian magazine, Buvar, warning of ecological
disasters on the River Danube if plans went ahead for two linked dams, one
in Hungary and the other over the border in Czechoslovakia. A party hack
went to the printers to forbid publication of the article, ostensibly because
it had been privately researched. And that, say Vargha’s friends, was the
start of a campaign that defied the government for years before bringing
about the cancellation of the Hungarian dam at Nagymaros earlier this year
– just as the facade of the Communist regime cracked and fell.

For most Hungarians, Vargha was the first citizen to defy the Stalinist
regime put in place after Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956. In
February 1984 he founded an organisation called the Danube Circle to fight
the dam and was, during the dark early days, its only public spokesman.

‘It was an extraordinary thing to do,’ says Andras Biro, a well-travelled
development consultant for the United Nations who left Hungary in 1956 but
returned in 1987, sensing change. ‘The Circle defied the government. They
diminished the fear of the people so that 10 000 people were prepared to
put their names and addresses to a petition opposing the dam.’ This was
at a time when the Danube Circle was still illegal, holding secret weekly
meetings in the home of Vargha’s parents in Buda and contacting supporters
by Samizdat, the underground publishing organisation.

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Vargha’s long campaign prised open the cracks between Stalinists and
reformists in the government and gave opponents the courage to organise
themselves publicly. ‘The breakthrough to political change here occurred
when the government suspended work on the dam,’ Biro believes.

I met Vargha in Budapest a few weeks ago as the Communists’ voluntary
demolition of their own system was being played out daily in millions of
homes, thanks to the televising of parliament. ‘For some years,’ said Vargha,
‘I was almost the only person who believed that the dam project would not
be completed.’ But, though his own concerns were primarily ecological, he
says now that these were not the issues that mattered politically – even
inside the anti-dam movement itself, where, he says, ‘ecological problems
played only a minor role’.

Most campaigners regarded the project as a national monstrosity, since
it surrendered land to Czechoslovakia and would be largely built by Austrians
to supply power to Austria. (One of Vargha’s first and most dangerous acts
was to contact Austria’s Greens for support.) ‘I realised three years ago
that post-Kadar (the last of the Stalinists) the Danube question would be
an issue in the subsequent fight for power,’ says Vargha. The reformist
wing of the Communist Party had begun a battle against the industrial lobbies
which Vargha sees as the real centres of power in a Stalinist state. ‘First
the reformers took on the mining conglomerate; then the water lobby.’ In
this respect, Vargha sees his victory as similar to that of reformers in
the Soviet Union who successfully opposed plans to divert Siberian rivers
to water the arid south of the USSR.

‘Our success was not a success for the environment movement as such,’
he warns. ‘There is a belief among Hungarians that plural democracy will
solve the ecological problems. But after the celebrations, there will be
grave days in Hungary for the environment.’

Ironically, at the moment of victory, Vargha resigned from the Danube
Circle, plunging the now-legal environmental group into crisis as it seeks
to find a new direction for its activities. His reasons may evoke sympathy
from many ecologists in the West. Once, he says, ‘the Circle had a good
scientific reputation, but now I am surrounded by people who are not interested
in gaining knowledge. They want glory and success in daily politics. They
want to march, produce leaflets, hold press conferences. But they lack data
and analysis.’

Now that the Samizdat days are passed, the Circle has been boarded by
newcomers. Some of those that Vargha likes least have this autumn formed
a Green Party. There is much dark talk about these interlopers and some
of Vargha’s friends believe the party’s formation is a Stalinist plot to
divide the opposition.

Vargha, meanwhile, is taking his own place in the new party political
scene. There is a widespread belief that, however far the reformist Communists
go, they will be defeated at the general election next spring. Vargha is
the architect of environmental policy for the Free Democrats and sits on
its main board. Many friends expect him to take a job in government after
the election.

But he claims other concerns. He is interested less in government than
in the revival of civic life in Hungary. For 30 years, he says, citizens’
activities of all sorts were deemed to be political – and politics was the
monopoly of the Communist Party. For Hungary to become a democracy again,
it is at least as important to create the civic undergrowth of societies,
clubs and campaigning groups of all sorts, untrammelled by party oversight
and the need to be sanctioned by the authorities, as it is to elect democrats
to parliament.

Vargha now finds himself at the centre of this civic movement. He introduced
me to Gyorgyi Mangel from the newly formed Independent Trade Union of Science
Workers, which has already won its first battle, to remove party officials
from their ‘super-shop steward’ status inside every factory and laboratory
in the land. And I met Istvan Rev, a fast-talking street-wise organiser
who heads the Blue List, a loose alliance of activists, many old timers
from the Danube Circle, who want to help to set up myriad social and environmental
groups around the country.

Vargha’s idea is to catalyse rather than control. ‘Many people want
to unify the green groups, since the local groups are mostly very weak,’
he says. ‘But we must leave them to find their own way. We need free sources
of green ideas that are not influenced by political bodies. We need to experiment.’

Vargha, who was relieved of his job as Hungarian editor of Scientific
American in 1986 because of his campaigning activities and has led a precarious
financial existence since then, now wants to set up an ecological research
institute, probably financed from abroad. It will look at new ecologically
sound ways to develop the ailing Hungarian economy, which claims the highest
debt per head of population in the world.

The massive state farms – modelled all too visibly on the American prairies
– have proved an ecological, social and economic disaster. They have destroyed
as many Hungarian villages as President Ceausescu plans to do over the border
in Romania, and they have contaminated with nitrate the drinking water of
hundreds of villages. There are, say environmentalists, dozens of cases
of ‘blue baby syndrome’ caused by nitrate poisoning each year. A new agricultural
model is desperately needed.

The struggle to preserve the free-flowing Danube from the Nagymaros
dam has absorbed almost a decade of the life of Vargha and many of his family
and friends. But the battle began even before 1980. Vargha’s parents and
their friends were involved in opposition to the dam when it was first proposed
in the mid-1960s. ‘It’s become a family affair,’ says Anna Varkonyi, a soul
mate who worked for Buvar in the early 1980s and was one of the founders
of the Circle. ‘But Janos risked almost everything. He had no money for
many years, but through it all he remained clean, uncorrupted and dedicated
to getting the science of his argument right.’

As I headed for the train back to Austria, Vargha was in deep discussion
with a visiting Czech environmentalist. At the time, he was predicting that
the government in Prague would fall, and that the Czech dam on the Danube,
although largely built, would never be filled. It will be interesting to
see just to what extent events provehim right.